This book provides a step-by-step guide for teachers to implement an action-based curriculum, using young adult literature to engage students with contemporary issues. In addition to reading, ELA core standards including speaking and writing are addressed within this curriculum. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the curriculum: helping students find their passion; guiding them in collaborative group reading of relevant novels; supporting them in researching, writing, and speaking about their topic; and helping them translate their ideas into action within their school and community. The book is set up in such a way that teachers can follow the curriculum from beginning to end—or, if they choose, incorporate only some of the chapters. The author brings the curriculum alive with teacher and student voices about their experiences. The appendix describes contemporary middle school and high school novels that address a variety of social justice topics. Ultimately, the book supports teachers as they inspire their students to examine issues with empathy, research potential solutions, and exercise agency as they take action to help address issues the students are passionate about.

This book illustrates how middle level English language arts teachers can draw upon young adult literature to facilitate students’ understanding of issues of oppression and allow them opportunities for social action. Each chapter centers on one novel that represents a contemporary topic including the refugee crisis, Indigenous rights, trauma, and bullying. In each, authors provide pre-, during-, and after reading strategies for teaching that connect the social issues in the texts to students’ lives and to the world around them. Research, writing, and digital literacies are emphasized throughout. Authors also include topics for teaching at the intersections of the focal topic with other areas of social justice. Finally, they provide a multitude of avenues for student action, emphasizing the need to move readers from understanding and awareness to asserting their own agency and capacities to effect change in their local, national, and global communities. Additional resources are also included as extensions, such as documentaries, young adult literature companions for study, connected music, and supplementary lesson plans.

"Learn how to support middle and high school students with specific literacy practices (reading, speaking, listening, and writing) that build resilience. The authors provide strategies based on their extensive knowledge and experience in trauma-sensitive instruction, adolescent literacy, and culturally responsive-sustaining pedagogies. The text includes teacher vignettes and implementation steps"--

A manual for teaching Young Adult Literature, this textbook presents perspectives and methods on how to organize and teach literature in engaging and inclusive ways that meet specific educational and programmatic goals. Each chapter is written by an expert and offers a rich and nuanced approach to teaching YA Literature through a distinct lens. The effective and creative ways to construct a course explored in this book include multimodal, historical, social justice, place-based approaches, and more. The broad spectrum of topics covered in the text gives pre-service teachers and students a toolbox to select and apply methods of their choosing that support effective reading and writing instruction in their own contexts, motivate students, and foster meaningful conversations in the classroom. Chapters feature consistent sections for theory and practice, course structure, suggestions for activities and assessments, and takeaways for further discussion to facilitate easy implementation in the classroom. This book is an essential text for pre-service teachers of English as well as professors and scholars of Young Adult Literature.

Engaging Audiences asks what cognitive science can teach scholars of theatre studies about spectator response in the theatre. Bruce McConachie introduces insights from neuroscience and evolutionary theory to examine the dynamics of conscious attention, empathy and memory in theatre goers.

Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by. The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics. The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to ‘be’ themselves in their work, to ‘care for themselves and others’ and to ‘count what isn’t counted’. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions.

In Activating Youth as Change Agents, editors Amy L. Cook and Ian P. Levy describe the applications of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a youth-oriented group process where school counselors collaborate alongside students in developmentally relevant ways to achieve their goals toward personal growth and positive school-community improvement. The book provides practitioners and counselors-in-training with group-counseling skills focused on action and how to engage in social justice efforts both locally at their school and in their communities.